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Virginia Hayward Creates the Ultimate Luxury Customer Experience

Virginia Hayward needed a platform that was robust, yet refined.

Over the past 35 years the Virginia Hayward brand has grown from a small enterprise to a leader in the luxury wine and food basket (or “hamper”) industry. As a family-owned and managed business, Virginia Hayward is keenly focused on quality products and customer service. They place a huge emphasis on getting it right for every customer, whether they are ordering one hamper or 10,000. That’s why each Virginia Hayward product is hand-selected and tested for quality.

To maintain this level of service, the brand needed to reinvigorate its online business. Virginia Hayward needed to ensure their customers have the same flexibility and high level of service online as was traditionally provided offline. Customers wanted creative control over their own, unique, personalized hamper. Virginia Hayward would need to streamline the ordering process and simplify how customers build their hamper. To accomplish that, they needed a site that gave them the flexibility and control to deliver on their vision. They chose Magento.

We chose Magento for its functionality, SEO friendliness and proven industry track record. Magento has helped our business to fill a gap in the market and helps us position ourselves as the UK’s leading independent hamper company.

Justin Walmsley

Digital Marketing Manager, Virginia Hayward

Exceeding expectations with personalized digital experiences.

Virginia Hayward was suffering from an outdated CMS website, with minimal flexibility. They had no out-of-the-box features, slow organic growth, and the cost of an upgrade was nearly as expensive as the initial development.

Having previous in-house experience with Magento, the Virginia Hayward team were familiar with its potential. After reviewing their options, they decided Magento Commerce would best meet their needs. Working with Magento solution partner, Fisheye, Virginia Hayward created a tailored customer service experience on Magento 1. The new site includes a unique hamper builder solution that allows customers to choose, fill, and customize a hamper—or multiple hampers—and send them to a single or multiple locations. To help customers complete their hampers, an intelligent upgrade system was employed to make product suggestions for filling remaining hamper space. Meanwhile, a real-time stock system reserves products for customers while they build their perfect basket, making it easy to complete the order and reach checkout. Once there, a customer has multiple payment options. And to make re-ordering even easier, a save/load functionality was created for custom baskets so clients can recreate multiple personalized baskets, duplicate them, rename them, and edit them.

For Virginia Hayward, customization didn’t stop at the hamper builder. The site redesign also includes a label designer that allows high-quality preset designs for complete personalization of the basket’s label. When a customer generates a message for their gift, they have a fully-flexible message editor with a toolset of fonts, colors, and formatting options. And because the message is so important, a real-time preview was implemented for accurate representation of the final print output

Customer satisfaction is equally dependent on delivery of the right product at the right time, and the right place. By providing seamless integration with Virginia Hayward’s order fulfillment and stock control systems, Magento helps the business to process a huge number of personalized orders every day, with total efficiency.

The gift that keeps on giving—customer satisfaction.

Magento helped Virginia Hayward deliver a complex process with simplicity, on any browsing device, and the results have been exceptional. With over 90 percent of their annual revenue generated between the months of October and December, the holiday season provided a challenge to their previous site. With Magento, Virginia Hayward processed over 400,000 hampers with confidence. And the hamper builder solution has resulted in an increase in large orders – some exceeding £6,000. The personalization of hampers has helped increase conversions and set Virginia Hayward apart from competitors.

When compared against the previous year’s KPIs, the website has outperformed. Increased SEO efforts has helped organic traffic grow 107 percent. There has been a 195 percent increase in overall transactions with transactions on mobile devices up 140 percent and up an extraordinary 307 percent on tablets. Naturally, revenue took a huge leap with an increase of 145 percent and the conversion rate jumped 98 percent. With Magento, Virginia Hayward is living up to customer expectations.